WORLD

Heat and Hunters

Time spent in a PvP zone is not free. The longer your Crawler stays out, the more attention it draws, and eventually something comes to collect.

Heat

Heat builds while you are in the Wastes and Deep Wastes, faster the deeper you are, and it cools while you are in the Frontier. It runs from empty to 100.

Hunters

Past 20 heat a Hunter can spawn and start moving toward you. A Hunter is not a wandering monster: it aims at where your Crawler is going to be, not where it is now, and it re-aims whenever you change course. Outrunning one in a straight line does not work.

It stops short of you rather than colliding, then fires. If you beat it, the fight ends there. If you do not, you lose what your Crawler is carrying the same way you would to a player.

Heat is the cost of a long run. The counterplay is to bank and cool off, which is the same decision the whole extraction loop is built on.

Three commanders

You can have 3 commanders active at once, and one of them can be assigned as the Crawler's defender. A defender never leaves home and fights anything that attacks your Crawler, so it is the one commander whose squad is worth keeping full even when you are not running anything.